Material Retail Dumps

Welcome to the Material Retail Dumps podcast. If you've listened to us before, thanks so much for coming back. If it's your first time listening, welcome Material Retail Dumps is a short form podcast with briefly valuable content for independent retailers. As business owners, we don't have time for a 30 minute lesson with a ton of banter. We get straight to the meat of the topic and aim to give you actionable information and will help you optimize your retail operation and make more money every

Day. Welcome to Material Retail Dumps, episode 34. This is gonna be another series. It's a two part series about security. The first episode is gonna be about security in your store. Things are, you know, just about your physical store. And the second episode's gonna be more about digital security and securing yourself and your business in the online channels. So let's jump right in. This episode's all about just securing your physical store. Now, in your store, you have a lot of valuable things. First of all, you have, you know, some computer equipment, you have some racks, you might have some cash, but more importantly, you have inventory and you might have between like 15 and $200,000 of inventory at cost. And that's a lot of money. Um, it's generally most of your assets are in inventory, so we gotta be careful. So, you know, a couple of basic things that you're just gonna need to do.

Um, they might cost a little bit of money on a monthly basis or to set it up, but it's just super important and there's some cheap ways to do it also. So we could go over those. Number one, get a camera system installed in your store. A, it's a deterrent for employees and, you know, maybe thieves. And b, if something does go wrong, you'll see exactly what happened. And whether you're showing that to the police or whether you're you, just, just for your own knowledge, you'll see exactly what happens. And, you know, there's a couple ways to do it. First thing you could do is you can get a, you know, professional to come in and install an alarm system. The other thing you could do is you could just go on amazon.com and buy some ring alarms or some other, you know, Google Nest alarms and just put 'em up connecting to your wifi.

It should be super easy and your go from there. Second thing you wanna make sure that you do is get an alarm system for the store. Um, people sometimes take that for granted, especially in safer areas, but just get an alarm system in the store. When you close at night, you set the alarm. If the door gets opened or a window gets opened or something happens, the police will immediately be notified and the people who are broken through your store will probably just leave. Uh, the third thing I wanna talk about in that same kind of regard is make sure that, make sure your keys cannot be duplicated. So don't cut just a regular house key that someone could just take to a locksmith and duplicate, get a key that can't be duplicated without a special card. So the most popular example of that is a multi lock key.

It's a multi lock. Um, and the only way to duplicate these keys are to have like a special key card that you go and take to a special locksmith that will go ahead and make a new key for you. If someone has the key, they can't just go and make a duplication. This is especially important because, you know, when you part ways with the manager or assistant manager or key holder, you, you get the keys back. And if you, if they could make copies of the keys, you know, they might have copies of the keys and that might come back to haunt you one day. The next thing I wanna talk about is counting the register. So it's extremely important to count the register every morning and every night. And whether it's you opening the store or again, a manager or assistant manager opening the store, you wanna make sure that key, that cash register is counted, end recorded.

You wanna make sure that, you know, if Elliot opens the store on Monday morning, that Elliot counted that there were two, there was $200 in the register in the morning, so that when Melissa comes in and closes the store on Monday night, she'll say, you know, we did 800 bucks in cash sales and there's now a thousand dollars in the register. And, you know, it's recorded. Everybody knows who did what. Everybody knows who's, you know, putting their name behind the cash. And then if there is a problem, you know, a, it happened either that day or the, you know, the night of. Um, and it's, it's much easier to look through a few transactions to see what went wrong. Um, and notice patterns when you're counting the cash every single day. If you only count the cash once a week, it becomes exponentially harder to do that.

Third thing I wanna talk about is implement employee security on your POS system. So it's super easy, but just make sure that every single person has their own login and password or pin number to get into the system. Every time a transaction goes through your system, every time a piece of inventory is changed, anything like that, it should be attached to an employee record. We can't just have things go missing. We can't have employees putting through refunds without knowing who did them. It's extremely important. And at the, at the lowest level, it just, it's a, another deterrent. It's another way that your employees know that my name is tied to this transaction. I have to be careful, um, and I have to do it right. And if I make a mistake, I'm gonna speak up about it. I'm not just gonna ignore it and let it fly.

I'm gonna tell my manager, Hey, I, you know, refunded this by accident. What can we do to fix it? And most of the times you just fix it. The last thing I wanna talk about, and, uh, it sounds obvious, but you know, a lot of people just ignore. It's just make sure you get insurance, whether it is insurance against a natural disaster like a flood or insurance in insurance on your inventory for theft, or even business interruption insurance. Get insurance. You never know what's gonna come outta the woodwork and just knock you off your path. And, you know, if you just have, you know, 25, 50 or a hundred grand spare, then you know what, maybe don't get insurance. But if you, if there's, if, if losing all your inventory to a flood or a fire or something like that will put you out of business for the future, then you cannot afford to not have insurance. Even if it's a couple grand a year, you gotta do it. You gotta make sure your business is always set up to continue operating, even if there's an issue. You know, you file a claim, you get your insurance payout and you just, you know, kind of start over in the same business and, uh, just, just keep it going. That's it for this one. I'm looking forward to the next episode. We're gonna talk about security in your digital life. Thanks so much.